Japan Ramen Tour: Tokyo Ramen

On our first and last days in Japan we ate ramen in Chiba and in Shizuoka prefectures.  But in between, we ate ramen in Tokyo.  And, as a good friend of mine would say, Tokyo is the man.  So let's head to Tokyo and talk about some ramen.  Things are pretty good there.  

Tokyo Subway Map.  Figure this out and you can tour ramen in Tokyo.  Link to Deep Japan here for help.

Tokyo Subway Map.  Figure this out and you can tour ramen in Tokyo.  Link to Deep Japan here for help.

The Best: Kyouka (Tachikawa, Tokyo)

Kyouka is run by regular Shoku no Dojo sensei, Keiichi Machida.  His ramen was the most sophisticated, without question.  He uses 21 ingredients in his broth, including 6 different kinds of niboshi (dried sardines).  The flavor was strong, balanced, nuanced.  It was like there was some essence of the ocean in the bowl.  But it wasn't heavy and it wasn't fishy.  The presentation was fantastic.  The space was mostly dark, but the chefs (visible working on a platform behind the bar counter) were illuminated by carefully placed spotlights, and the food by adjustable lamps at each seat along the bar.  Salt content a relatively restrained 1.2-1.3%.

Soupless Ramen (Ginza, Tokyo)

We wanted to try soupless ramen, called aburasoba in Japan.  We're planning to feature it at Shiba Ramen, but not many places here serve it.  So it was important to try it in Japan.  We looked at some best-of lists sitting around in our hotel room and found a place in the Ginza district of Tokyo.  The restaurant, Mugi to Olive ("Wheat and Olive"), also specialized in clam ramen.  I thought the aburasoba was awesome.  Tasted great and it was topped with the most orange egg yolk I've ever seen, which created a really nice texture.  Clam ramen was good, but pretty salty (1.8%).  We liked the space. Modern, using wood, concrete, and even rebar.

One-Item Menu, 1500 Bowls a Day (Yokohama, Outside Tokyo)

We had read about Yoshimura Iekei ramen months ago, in a book Hiroko picked up in Japan last year.  This is a place that serves a single kind of ramen, a salty tonkotsu shoyu (pork, soy) that came to define a local style of "Iekei" ramen in Yokohama (technically outside Tokyo, but it's close and it still feels like Tokyo).  There are a ton of places that serve this kind of ramen in Yokohama, but this is apparently the original.   

Because they only serve one thing, they just keep a single running pot of soup going all the time and dispense it right into the serving bowls.  There are just 25 seats at the bar counter (I counted), but they supposedly serve 1500 bowls a day!  They're open for 13.5 hours each day.  That means they need to turn over the entire bar every 15 minutes or so.  Nobody's screwing around.  You sit down, the food comes out, you eat it, you leave.  It was good.  It's no frills and completely without style or pretension, but there's always a line to eat there. Kyouka's Machida said he makes it a point to eat there every time he's in Yokohama.  We thought the ramen was pretty good, very salty (over 2%!), but not quite as good as we expected.  It was also rumored to be thicker than we experienced.  There's probably very little quality control just using a single ongoing vat of pork broth; you can imagine the concentration of the soup is constantly in flux.

There's good writeup of this place on Ramen Adventures, a really comprehensive English-language blog about ramen in Tokyo written by an American expat living there.  A great resource if you're going to Tokyo.

Tan Tan Men, Spicy Ramen (Kanda, Tokyo)

We wanted to try tan tan men, preferably a spicy one.  We're going to serve a spicy tan tan, so we wanted to try one in Japan.  The place we found (Hokiboshi Plus) had a good reputation for this kind of ramen.  We also found Taiwan maze-soba on the menu, so we decided to try it too. Taiwan maze-soba is a spicy soupless ramen that originated in Nagoya, Japan (not Taiwan), and recently took off in Tokyo due to the arrival there of a popular Nagoya restaurant, Hanabi.  We had wanted to try Hanabi but it was too far out of the way, so we were excited to find this dish at Hokiboshi Plus.

Both ramens we tried featured a singular and over-the-top flavor.  The spicy tan tan (below left) made wild overuse of really distinctive Chinese spices.  Meanwhile, the Taiwan maze-soba (right) was practically wallowing in fish powder, every bite a mouthful of katsuobushi.  See pile of light brown powder at 4 o'clock in the bowl (in retrospect, who knew?).  I like katsuobushi, but I still had to work pretty hard to finish this stuff.  

I don't know what was the deal with this place, but I suspect it is an example of (what Chef Machida told us is) a current ramen trend in Tokyo: focusing on singular strong flavors.  Otherwise the ramen seemed to have really good fundamentals, but the these super-dominant flavors overwhelmed everything else and made it pretty unpalatable (in my opinion).  My guess is that most Japanese wouldn't find this ramen as jarring as I did; flavors like fish powder are just more ingrained and familiar.  But there's no way we could sell a product like this in the U.S.  Salt = 1.5%.

Japan Ramen Tour in Pictures

Last month we went to Japan.  But this was no ordinary vacation.  This was a business trip!  The purpose: eating ramen.  We thought that a great way to evaluate our own product would be to go to Tokyo and eat ramen day after day, trying styles and flavors and absorbing the atmosphere.  Daily ramen intake would help sharpen our ramen sensitivities, in a way that would be hard to achieve in the U.S.  It's impossible to match the sheer concentration of ramen shops in Japan, or the diversity in the ramen they serve.  This kind of experience would give us a better lens to look at what we're doing with Shiba Ramen.

Ramen Street Map.  Underground mall, Tokyo Station.  

Ramen Street Map.  Underground mall, Tokyo Station.  

So we made up our minds to eat ramen at least once each day, and to try two kinds of ramen at every restaurant.  Of course, we had to reserve meals for friends and family and for eating toro (which occurred not less than three times).  We ended up trying 13 different bowls of ramen over 6 days.  We even exceeded our once-a-day goal, once having ramen for both lunch and dinner.  Two different ramens at each restaurant, except for one that only had a single-item menu, where we got two bowls of the same thing.  

In the process, we tried spicy ramens, clam ramens, soupless ramens, and chain restaurant ramens.  At every single place, we paid in advance at a ticket machine (see below).  Some places we found through recommendations or website best-of lists, some just because they happened to be there when we needed to eat ramen.  Some were great, some were good, and some were just so-so.  We measured the ramen's salt content at each restaurant (an important metric).  

Let's start our ramen tour with three shops outside Tokyo, in Chiba prefecture to the east and Shizuoka prefecture to the West.  Next time we'll hit four shops in Tokyo.  

Next to Ramen School (Yachiyo, Chiba)

We hoofed it out to Chiba for our trip to ramen school the morning after we arrived in Japan.  After our visit, we were starving.  We asked Akimoto-san for a recommendation, and he suggested a place called Junki right down the road from Shoku no Dojo; we'd walked past it on the way from the bus stop.  This was exciting.  First ramen of the tour!  We walked in, and saw right away how ramen is ordered and paid for in Japan: through a ticket machine next to the entrance.  We ordered, handed our tickets to one of the servers, and sat down.  

A few minutes later two bowls of ramen arrived, along with two mandatory beers.  We tried a tonkotsu (below left) and spicy miso (below right).  Very tasty, a lot of flavor, and a nice pile of vegetables on top.  The best part, though, was that they had roasted the chashu over coals, giving it a great charcoal grill flavor.  The grilled flavor was pulled into the broth, and enhanced the whole experience.  The ramen was pretty salty (1.8% or so) and garlicky.  All in all, positive, and I think this ramen would be a hit here in the U.S.

Meh. Chain Ramen (Mishima, Shizuoka)

We wanted to try at least one chain restaurant ramen.  There are a lot of large ramen chains in Japan, and we wanted to visit one of the more highly rated ones and evaluate the quality of the ramen against the other stuff we were eating.  We were passing through the Izu Peninsula, on a Shinkansen bullet train ride from Tokyo to Hamamatsu (Hiroko's hometown), and we got off the train along the way to meet a friend in the town of Mishima.  Mishima is near the ocean; they have good sushi there, so our first stop was a sushi restaurant to have some of the local catch (fyi this is 4 hours after an 8:30 a.m. sushi breakfast).  

But this was also our last chance on the trip to try chain ramen, since our trip home was the next day.  So we did a second lunch at what was reputed to be a pretty good chain, Ramen Kagetsu (third-largest chain in Japan with 276 locations).  The interior was sort of dilapidated, but it was still pretty full on a Sunday at 1 p.m.  We ordered some tonkotsu (lower left) and miso (lower right).  When they were hot, they tasted ok.  Fairly salty (~1.5%), but not as strong as other places.  As they cooled down, though, the taste changed and it became clear that a lot of msg had been added to prop up the flavor.  In the end, pretty much meh.  We didn't come close to finishing (although we were handicapped by those plates of nigiri we'd downed 30 minutes earlier).  

Train Station Ramen and Hamamatsu Gyoza (Hamamatsu, Shizuoka)

On our last day, we took the Shinkansen back to Tokyo and decided to squeeze in one last ramen at Hamamatsu Station.  Our real objective was to eat the style of gyoza popular in the area: "Hamamatsu gyoza." Hiroko has been telling me for years about some restaurant that specializes in Hamamatsu gyoza, on the far edge of town out in the middle of a bunch of farm fields. Supposedly this place's cabbage-filled gyoza are hugely popular, so despite the remoteness, we'd planned to go.  

When we realized there wasn't enough time to get there, we decided to find a ramen shop in the train station.  There was only one place, so that's where we went.  We got some dark miso ramen (lower left) and clear shio (salt) ramen (right), along with a side of apparently very unremarkable Hamamatsu gyoza.  It was solid, but not as good as the stuff we'd eaten in Tokyo, and too salty (2%).  The charcoal grilled chashu, however, was redeeming.  

Japan Diary: Field Trip to Ramen School

Our first morning in Japan, after a jet-lagged 6:30 a.m. breakfast at Denny’s surrounded by a room of solo-dining salarymen, we took a train from Tokyo to the hinterlands out in Chiba Prefecture. A bus ride from the train station led us to our destination, Shoku no Dojo, a ramen school run by Shigekatsu Akimoto. On its English website, the school calls itself Tokyo Ramen Academy.  Hiroko spent ten days there last fall, learning from Akimoto-san and a number of well-known ramen chefs. We wanted to get Akimoto-san’s advice about the finer points of designing Shiba Ramen’s kitchen, which has been an active item for us this spring. We took the opportunity to sit down with him for a talk about ramen.

Ramen School Chief.  Shigekatsu Akimoto of Shoku no Dojo, explaining some of his kitchen designs.  

Ramen School Chief.  Shigekatsu Akimoto of Shoku no Dojo, explaining some of his kitchen designs.  

Akimoto-san cuts an interesting figure, decked out in a black v-neck t-shirt and gold chain, and driving a long white sedan with black-tinted windows. He’s not a chef, let alone a ramen chef. He started off years ago selling restaurant equipment for a big company. He was pretty successful, and eventually struck out on his own. Over time, he built a business that not only supplied equipment, but also designed kitchens and restaurant spaces. As of today, he’s overseen some 3600 kitchen design projects, including 1000 ramen kitchens. He and his team sell the equipment, do the kitchen layouts, and often the aesthetic designs too.

In 2011, the day after the earthquake and tsunami devastated part of northern Japan, Akimoto-san led a group to the heart of the disaster zone to serve hot ramen to survivors. It must have been a shocking, searing sort of experience.  Akimoto-san explained to us the scale of the destruction and the proximity of widespread death, the landscape still strewn with bodies when he arrived.  He was accompanied by his friend, the well-known Japanese ramen critic, Hideyuki Ishigami. Along the way, they got to talking about why so many ramen restaurants fail. According to Akimoto-san, more than 600 of the 1000 ramen restaurants he designed are no longer in existence. Akimoto-san and Ishigami hypothesized that too many owners lack sufficient understanding of the product and are unable to adapt as trends and tastes change. Remember that with 35,000+ ramen restaurants, competition in Japan is fierce.

This conversation resulted in the founding of Shoku no Dojo. Akimoto owns the school and oversees its operations, but a gigantic picture of Ishigami is featured on the the front of the building. The school is housed in the same building as one of Akimoto’s equipment showrooms, next to a gas station, in what seems like the middle of nowhere. For two weeks every month, a handful of students come to the Dojo and learn how to make ramen like a professional. Some 95% have no previous restaurant experience!  But when they finish the course, they're prepared to make above-average ramen by Japanese standards.

Akimoto-san brings in a series of notable ramen chefs to teach the ramen 101 basics, as well as their own advanced styles and techniques. There is a segment on noodles with a field trip to a noodle factory, and a segment where the students design and develop their own recipes. There is even a segment about the basics of running a small business taught by an accountant.  The course concludes with the students making their recipes and serving them to real customers (at a deeply discounted price) at the bar in the Dojo.

So far, about 150 students have graduated from the Dojo. Roughly half of those have already started their restaurants, and the rest have restaurants in the works. Many of those end up using Akimoto-san's design and equipment services.  Some students are thinking about big business outside of Japan. One student has opened three successful shops in Toronto, and others are targeting China and India. And, of course, Shiba Ramen here in the East Bay.

Hiroko and I are really grateful that we found the Dojo. The price of attendance was low, and Akimoto has made himself available to us, by email and in person, when we’ve had questions about ingredients, equipment, and kitchen design. It’s a great service for people like us, although you do need to speak Japanese for this to be a viable strategy for ramen education. There are only a couple of other schools like this in Japan. When we were vetting options for professionalizing our ramen, we talked to one ramen ingredient supplier who consults for startup ramen businesses. He told us that he’d recently gone to China to help someone there get started. For this service he charged $50,000 plus a percentage of the business’s profits. That kind of money is crazy talk for basic technical know-how that isn’t exactly secret intellectual property. The Dojo was an infinitely better alternative.

Next time, I’ll tell you about a different Akimoto-san, a mechanical engineer who has given up his day job at Nissan to pursue his dream of making it big with ramen in India.

Japan Diary: Tokyo Owl Cafe. So Magical.

Last month in Tokyo, in between one bowl of ramen and the next, Ramen Chemistry stopped by an "owl cafe."  It was possibly the most amazing hour we've spent.  Like ever.  Words like "transcendent" and "magical" come to mind.  You'd be forgiven for thinking I'm given to hyperbole, but let me be clear:  this is no exaggeration.  The owl cafe is a parallel plane on which Japanese sensibilities fuse with live owls, and it's completely hands-on.  Could anything be more fucking awesome?  Obviously not.  

Small Owl Area.  Behind are two owls taking the day off.  Left one is on a diet and is "cranky."

Small Owl Area.  Behind are two owls taking the day off.  Left one is on a diet and is "cranky."

Five days a week, at 1:00 p.m., curious customers line up in front of Fukuro no Mise (literally "Owl Show"), one of Tokyo's animal cafes.  The cafe's exterior is completely unassuming, just a space on the first floor of some anonymous apartment block in the vast urban expanse of Tokyo.  Its identity is marked by a small fence, which creates a buffer space around the entrance, and an assortment of owl images stuck on the window.  Reservations are taken at 1:00 for hour-long blocks later that day, the first of which doesn't start until 2:00, an hour later.  Once the reservations are made, everyone is reabsorbed into Tokyo until returning at each's appointed time.  

Entering the owl cafe feels like stepping through a portal into a another dimension.  Once through, we found ourselves in a little and very crowded room, the size of a small studio apartment.  Ikea owl curtains kept the space in relative darkness, even in midday.  Immediately inside the door, five large owls sat tethered to a long perch, at the end of which sat a barn owl on a concrete pedestal.  

Another perch (with 2 midsize owls) sat perpendicular to the first, separating the large owl area from the small owl area (seated apart because the large ones might harm the small ones).  Here sat seven tiny owls on a long perch, with a few more owls sitting off to the side, taking a day off from being manhandled by delighted young Japanese girls and foreign tourists.  The walls were covered in a wild assortment of random crap and owl kitsch.  

Three owl handlers-baristas directed the thirteen customers, each having paid ¥2000 (a bit over $15) for admission, to a little circle of seats around a coffee table.  After each customer submitted a drink order, a handler gave a short demonstration, then liberated us to wander around in very close quarters and hang out with the owls.  

Not only were we free to pet any of the owls but, upon request, the handlers would place your owl of choice on your arm or shoulder.  You could walk around with them, and you could hold as many owls as you wanted over the course of 40 minutes or so.  The handlers spent the entire time moving owls from one person to another.  We each held around five owls.  At some point, the group's drink order was placed on the coffee table.  Not a single person touched the drinks (mostly hot tea) that were served; nobody wanted to compromise a second of their owl time.  The only exceptions were me and Hiroko.  Our view is that, if we could drink beer while holding owls, why in the world wouldn't we?   

The customers seemed uniformly transfixed and amazed by this bizarre experience, confined for an hour in a tiny room with sixteen people and seventeen owls.  Cameras and smartphones (ours included) were out everywhere.  As the hour drew to a close, we returned the owls to their perches and sat down to consume the drinks, some thirty minutes after they were served.  Time was short and we were forced to pound the rest of our beers; the practical reality being that it's hard to seriously consume beer when you have an owl on one hand and a camera in the other.  Before we left this urban owl cave, the handlers gave us owl souvenirs.  I got a stuffed purple owl on a string.

If you're wondering, the owls were great.  Completely serene; accepting, and even seeming to appreciate, affection.  They were lighter than we expected.  We were exhausted and jet-lagged that day, pretty run down, but the owl experience acted like some curative force, really holding us in the moment and surprising us with how quickly the hour passed.     

There are apparently a few of these places in Tokyo.  The one we went to was the first, and supposedly is the best experience.  The Japanese have a lot of these kinds of things; cat cafes, reptile cafes, falcon cafes.  These animal cafes seem to be catching on outside of Japan.  Here in Oakland, we have a cat cafe, and a few months ago a pop-up owl cafe opened briefly in London.  

So I'll close by saying that we need to have an owl cafe here in the U.S., preferably here in Oakland/Berkeley so that I can be among the owls again, as soon as possible.  But I doubt that this kind of setup--birds, drinks, together--would fly with American health departments.  The owls do shit on the floor periodically, gloved handlers swooping in with paper towels to clean up the mess.